Front Ports for PCs?

Vassily Overveight asks: "After the 400th time hauling my PC out from under my desk in order to mess with the cabling, I'm wondering if there's a better way. I'd like to find a means of bringing frequently-accessed I/O ports to the front of the machine so that I can attach/detach things like my palmtop, digital camera and camcorder, microphone, headphones, etc. with ease. Frontx has made a good start with a drive-bay installable set of ports for multimedia (audio-in, earphone, microphone, and game port), with promises of other port types in the future, but I'd like to find out if there're any other offerings already available (particularly in the form of an external box) that also provide front access to serial, parallel, USB, firewire, etc."

Comments

The only problem..

[Inoshiro]

Most cases today are designed such that all ports are in the back. With the older AT motherboard layout, you could have long internal cables connecting the appropriate motherboard connector to a front panel one, but the ATX motherboards have the ports rather firmly attached at the rear.

A possible solution is to develop a generic case that has front plate mounts, and hope it is adopted as a standard. Then people can have a comm port, USB connector, and firewire port on the front as standard (as well as add-in connectors for audio jacks and the like).

However, until a standard appears, anything possible will likely be a hack that won't work the same on similar boxes.
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